Windows Presentation Foundation

1. Windows Presentation Foundation

2. Goal The goal of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is to provide these advances for Windows. Included in version 3.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework, WPF allows building interfaces that incorporate documents, media, two- and three-dimensional graphics, animations, Web-like characteristics, and much more.

3. Illustrating the Problem • Suppose a hospital wants to create a new application for examining and monitoring patients. The requirements for this new application's user interface might include the following: • Displaying images and text about the patient. • Displaying and updating two-dimensional graphics showing the patient's vital signs, such as heart rate and blood pressure. • Providing three-dimensional views and overlays of patient information. • Presenting video of ultrasounds and other diagnostics, perhaps allowing physicians and nurses to add annotations. • Allowing hospital staff to read and make notations on documents describing the patient and her condition. • Running both as a Windows application, allowing full capability for hospital employees, and in a security-restricted Web browser application, allowing more limited access by remote physicians via the Internet.

4. Changing Perspective • User interfaces that present the right information in the right way at the right time can have significant business value. • Modern applications can benefit from providing interfaces that integrate graphics, media, documents, and the other elements of a modern user experience.

5. The Hurdles • Variety of technology : difficult to find developers. • Designing an interface that effectively presents all of this functionality to users is challenging. • Professional designers are required—software developers don't have the right skills—but designers and developers face significant challenges in working together, especially with full-featured interfaces like the one described here.

6. The Hurdles • Offering a full-featured interface as both a standalone Windows desktop application and a browser-hosted version would require building two separate implementations using two different sets of technology. • The Windows desktop application would likely use Windows Forms and other native Windows technologies, while the browser-hosted application would use HTML and JavaScript. • Two different groups of developers with two quite different skill sets are needed.

7. Addressing the Problem: What Windows Presentation Foundation Provides • Three aspects of what WPF provides stand out as most important. They are: • a unified platform for modern user interfaces, • the ability for developers and designers to work together, • and a common technology for Windows and Web browser user interfaces.

8. Where am I? • To create the forms, controls, and other typical aspects of a Windows graphical user interface, a developer would most likely choose Windows Forms, part of the .NET Framework. • If the interface needs to display documents, Windows Forms has some support for on-screen documents, while fixed-format documents might use Adobe's PDF. • For images and two-dimensional graphics, that developer will use GDI+, a distinct programming model that is also accessible via Windows Forms. • To display video and audio, he might rely on Windows Media Player, and for three-dimensional graphics, he'll use Direct3D, a standard part of Windows.

9. Who will help? • Provide a single unified solution: • WPF. Developers creating applications for machines with WPF installed will likely use it to address all the areas listed above. • After all, why not use one coherent foundation for creating user interfaces rather than a diverse collection of independent technologies? • Yet by providing a broad range of functionality in a single technology, WPF can make creating modern user interfaces significantly easier.

10. The Vision!

11. Beyond!

12. Unimaginable!

13. Three in one flavor! • The information • The Video • The document • To define fixed format document , Microsoft has created the XML Paper Specification (XPS). • WPF application programming interfaces (APIs) can be use to create and work with XPS documents. • Unification of technologies is required to create a user interface into a single foundation. • WPF can make life significantly simpler for the people who create those interfaces. • Creating and maintaining applications less expensive. • And by making it straightforward to build interfaces that incorporate graphics, video, and more, WPF can improve the quality—and business value—of how users interact with Windows applications.

14. The Ability for Developers and Designers to Work Together • To allow this, WPF introduces the eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML). XAML defines a set of XML elements such as Button, TextBox, Label, and many more to define exactly how a user interface looks. • XAML elements typically have attributes as well, allowing various options to be set. • For example, this simple XAML snippet creates a red button containing the word "No": <Button Background="Red"> No </Button>

15. The Answer XAML • Each XAML element corresponds to a WPF class, and each of that element's attributes has a corresponding property or event in the class. For example, the same red button could be produced with this C# code: Button btn = new Button(); btn.Background = Brushes.Red; btn.Content = "No";

16. Why XAML? • If everything expressible in XAML is also expressible in code—and it is—what's the value of XAML? • The answer is that building tools that generate and consume XML-based descriptions is much easier than doing the same thing with code. • Because XAML offers a tool-friendly way to describe a user interface, it provides a better way for developers and designers to work together.

17. The Gamut! • A designer can specify how a user interface should look and interact using a tool such as Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. Oriented entirely toward defining the look and feel of a WPF interface, this tool generates a description of that interface expressed in XAML. • A developer then imports that XAML description into a tool such as Microsoft Visual Studio. • Rather than recreating the interface from scratch based on static images produced by a designer, the interface definition itself is adopted wholesale. • The developer then writes the code for the interface, such as event handlers, along with any other functionality the application requires. • It's also possible to create styles that can be globally applied to an application's interface, allowing it to be customized as needed for different situations.